


The National Gallery

by LSDAndKizuki



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, London, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-24 09:07:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9714719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LSDAndKizuki/pseuds/LSDAndKizuki
Summary: On a quiet Friday afternoon, April hears a message in her head. It has been forwarded to everyone else in the country, and it says this: Do not go to the National Gallery tomorrow. Naturally, she goes anyway.





	

April got the message at four in the afternoon on Friday, when she was restocking chocolate bars on the counter. It warbled in her head like a distant radio signal: _don’t visit the National Gallery_

She frowned and attempted to recognise the voice of the messenger. It was male, which narrowed it down some: could it be Rick? Edward? Zachary? The signal was too distorted to be sure. There was the crackle of a shopping centre intercom, and it repeated: _don’t visit the National Gallery tomorrow_

It was said with no power behind it, barely a sliver of force. She hardly had to try and combat it. “Why?” she asked, routinely, languidly. “Why should I do what you say?”

And then the message was completely gone, confounded in a cloud of static. She scoffed at the weakness of it. Normally there was at least some resistance, a whispered threat _(I’ll kill your children if you don’t)_ or a plea _(I need you to do it for me, please)_ or simple confident assertion _(BECAUSE I said so, bitch),_ which made the ensuing mental battle far more interesting. Here the message had simply faded away, disinterested, impersonal, because – it finally hit her in a satisfying click of puzzle pieces and aligning chocolate bars – it _was_ impersonal. It truly was an intercom message, a broadcast sent out for everyone to hear. Swimming in a million people’s subconscious minds already, but audible only to the few: _Don’t visit the National Gallery._

The static returned, with the hastiness of someone quickly adding something they’d forgotten: _make that Trafalgar Square in general_

“But _why?_ ” she asked aloud, as if the broadcaster could hear her naked voice. Why ban everyone from the National Gallery for one day? Why quarantine the whole courtyard? Anxiety pricked her – suppose it was a bomb? Perhaps the broadcaster had heard things – perhaps he was trying to save any hapless sightseers from certain death. Or perhaps he had a heist in mind, but no intention of causing bodily harm…

The message still rang inside her head, this time through her own internal echo, turning it over and over. Why _not_ visit the gallery? People went every day. What was special about tomorrow? If there _was_ a bomb, then it wouldn’t be there tomorrow, because the bomber would have received the message too. And if he wanted to steal a painting, there had to be more efficient ways of doing that than this.

The curiosity was becoming too much to bear. The bells above the door jangled as an elderly customer hobbled in and began quietly to fill her arms with various newsagent snacks, poring through the packets of crisps on the walls, selecting an appropriate soft drink from the cooler and finally, with sad defeated eyes, pointing at a Snickers bar newly arranged on the front of the counter. April took the old woman’s money, gave her the change, offered her a plastic bag and decided that she would visit the gallery tomorrow.

It’s not my fault, she thought. It just keeps happening. I’m incapable of obeying the messages I get in my head…

The change in atmosphere was apparent from the moment she stepped out of Charing Cross tube station. She was overtaken by the familiar feeling of release and calm one feels when entering a quiet park. The rushing of water could be heard in the fountains, whose stone edges stood smooth and unseated; her unaccompanied footsteps clicked desolately across the square. It was a winter’s Saturday morning and Charing Cross was no different from the suburb she lived in. There was the hazy buzz of people _elsewhere_ and not too far, maybe a few yards up the Strand and towards the river, but here there was a clearing, populated only by those who were working, shopping or jogging. In the eerie calm she thought she could hear the Thames powering along, but this was surely a figment of her imagination.

There it was, dominating the North side of the rectangle: a great neoclassical block. It looked uncovered and almost self-conscious in its lack of people, usually dripping out of its sides and overflowing from its steps and balconies like dressing. It occurred to April that the broadcaster was most likely to be in there, alone, doing whatever mischief he’d reserved only for himself… Who _was_ it? The voice had sounded vaguely familiar, but there was no name she could attach to it. When she imagined the voice, she imagined with it a pair of glasses, but this was her only clue. How many of the messengers she knew wore glasses?

She ascended the steps, and entered the gallery. The people at the information centre were there, but there were few others. A woman in a blue jacket behind the counter had her head obscured by her arms, leaning her full upper body against the table. Some co-workers stood in a clump, talking quietly to each other – quiet, for no apparent reason, other than the fact that such deadening silence in such a large building seemed to invite more silence. Like a library: the uncomfortable feeling of being in a place which would receive loud words like cuts and blows. April headed towards them. “Where is everybody?” she asked, at normal speaking volume. They looked at her with glassy, unfocused eyes.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said a security guard with an afro. Then, in a more professional tone of voice, he added, “there’s an exhibition of monochrome painting in the Sunley room. It’s really interesting, would you like to have a look?”

April considered this. “Has anyone else gone into it today?”

There was a moment of lethargic silence, until the blue-jacketed woman raised her head from her snooze. “There was that man.”

Each sentence seemed to follow an unnecessarily long pause. April prompted the woman. “What did he look like?”

The woman squinted. “… Glasses,” she said, finally.

“He didn’t want to see the exhibition,” the afro-sporting guard now raised a hand, pointing towards some steps off to the right. “He went straight to level two.”

“What was he looking for?” April pressed on.

“A ship,” a look of distressed uncertainty crossed over the guard’s face. “He said he was looking for a ship and the sunset.”

As April walked away from them, she heard another one of their voices, a female one, alert and clear: “Trafalgar square is empty. We’ve been abandoned.”

She waded through the corridors and enclaves, each deserted, each splendorous. Pink walls, golden-wood floors, ornate ceilings and doors, all unpeopled and the more appealing for it. No one was looking at Gogh’s sunflowers, no one was backpedalling down one side of the Ambassadors to see the skull, and the Hay Wain was as muted and quiet outside as within. April sidled unaccompanied up to larger-than-life Whistlejacket, looked hard at his wise equestrian face, heard a shuffle somewhere behind her – and now she knew that she was in the right place.

When she saw him, at first she did not recognise him. He was a broadcaster with whom she had had little conversation, mental or otherwise. She had been right, however, about the glasses: he pushed them further up his nose when he turned around to face her. “April, right?” he said, and the words carried like a telepathic message in that unpolluted air, so unburdened by human thought, destressed…

“Right. –Tom, is it?”

“That’s me.” He turned back to face the wall, and April came up behind him.

“That’s what you came for?”

“You bet.”

A ship and the sunset. Being led away from the turbulent skies to the junkyard, pearly white against its executioner’s black sheen, a ghost about to be destroyed forever: the Fighting Temeraire. In the same room as Stubbs’ Whistlejacket, it was a small, inconsequential thing. Un-promoted, un-centred, you really had to be looking for it. “You wanted to steal it?” April asked. “Why not just ask the authorities to let you have it?”

Tom sighed. “I don’t want to steal it. I want to look at it.”

“Then why the message?” she asked, even though she knew the answer now, had understood it while walking through these walls. Nothing could compare to feeling like every step meant something, without being accompanied by millions of others. “I mean,” she continued, “A city-wide broadcast. Really! Talk about a waste of your power…”

There was no one to stop him, so he reached out a hand and lightly touched the two-hundred-year-old canvas. “I was bored,” he said softly, as he caressed the hazy line between sea and sky.

“We _all_ get bored.” And some, she had to admit, were more destructive in their boredom than this.

“And there’s just so _many_ of them,” Tom continued, an edge to his voice. His fingers curled against the painting. “All so _stupid,_ so damned easy to manipulate, and I was planning on seeing this painting, and I thought – why should I have to suffer looking at it with all of _them_ standing around?” He brought his hand away from the Temeraire to pick at some dry skin on his bottom lip. “And most of them don’t even know why they’ve come.”

“The art students,” April argued, “What’s wrong with the art students? _They_ know why they’ve come. And why cut off the whole _square?_ ” He had no response for any of this. “You realise you messed up the people at the counter by doing this? They’re all really confused, and they’re not about to forget why. You’ve caused a scene doing this. There’ll be inquiries. _People,_ Tom. People are going to want to know what happened.”

He sucked in a breath. “Worth it.” She understood how it was. All it took was a little power, just a soupcon to taste, and the confidence would come gradually but inexorably: the feeling that you were better than everybody else. It was a dreadful, shameful feeling. Alone in an art gallery, one could address that feeling without any of the discomfort of being watched while doing so.

They stood in silence for an indefinable amount of time, and in that time not one soul entered their own room of the National Gallery. Eventually April put an arm round him, and reached into her coat pocket for a tissue. “Here, mate.”

He sniffled a quiet _thank you,_ and mopped his face. They left the gallery together, and entered the square, grey under an overcast day, and threatened with rain, rain which would pool darkly in its corners, like the faded edges of old paper... Tom looked despondently up at the clouds. “What would I have to do to order the Sun to shine?”

The first splash of rain struck her: a facetious response. She wrinkled her nose at it. “If we knew the answer to that, there’d be no more rainy days,” she said wryly. “And then what would we do?”

A cluster of pigeons had fallen upon a mouldering wrap, left on the steps from one of the joggers or workers. The birds bustled eagerly around it, murmuring, and April and Tom stepped politely around them. The Sun was not visible at that moment, but they both knew it was there: it was the only thing allowing them to see.


End file.
